Watching, Waiting
by Lucy Gillam
Summary: Michael Meyers is dead.  Laurie and Dr. Loomis both know this, of course.  Set between Halloween II and H20.


It takes him two years to find her after the car accident. By then she is already married, already pregnant, and he doesn't need to count to know which came first. He hopes she'll finish college; a mind that bright should be allowed to shine.

She was smart about the whole process, choosing a name that sounded enough like her own to avoid careless mistakes, setting everything up before faking the accident. He would not have thought the girl who spoke so tearfully of the Boogeyman had it in her, the ruthlessness to let her parents grieve, the cold sense to know that she was saving their lives by doing so. He cannot help but approve.

The pregnancy makes him nervous, though. A girl risks drawing Michael back out, giving him new reason to attack, but a boy…

"A boy could be like him," he mutters.

"Like who?" Ms. Chambers – Mrs. Whittington, he must remember - calls from the kitchen.

He doesn't bother to answer. He knows that he's verged on hysteria since that horrible night, crying like Cassandra that Michael had not died in the fire. She's one of the few who doesn't look at him as if he were ready for the very institutions he served for so long, and he has no desire to tempt fate.

He will keep watching, safely, from a distance. There is time.

Her mother-in-law doesn't understand why the sight of John in the clown costume causes Laurie to go into hysterics. Surely a little boy's second Halloween is the time for something adorable, before he develops enough awareness to scorn it in favor of ghouls and pirates and football players.

"There was an incident when she was younger," Charles says vaguely, changing John into a hastily assembled pumpkin costume by dressing him all in orange and tying a plant leaf to his head. He soothes his mother by allowing her to take John trick-or-treating.

By the time they return, the pills have done their magic, and "Keri" is able to coo appropriately as John gums a Hershey bar.

The next year, she buys his costume herself in early September. He goes as a cowboy, waving a toy cap gun at the neighbors and eliciting chuckles and pats on the head. Charles' mother clucks about the violence. She still thinks the clown costume was better.

They officially close the case five years after Michael Myers' "death."

He writes letters, makes phone calls, but does not visit anyone in person. The sight of his ruined face does his cause no favors, and he knows that the longer he speaks, the increasingly easier he becomes to dismiss. He suspects no one believes him to be aware of how he is perceived, but he is, painfully.

He doesn't even have the comfort of hoping that someday they'll know how wrong they were, because who could wish such an awful thing? He looks at his small corkboard, with its fading clippings and the newspaper picture of Laurie Strode.

Her child will be four now. He's seen him only once, when he traveled to California on the excuse of a conference he'd no intention of attending. He'd watched the two of them, just a young mother pushing her toddler in a stroller, the signs of her own sleepless nights and tenuous control visible only if you knew to look for them. He did not dare more than a few minutes, even from a distance. The days when he could blend into a crowd ended at Haddonfield Memorial Clinic.

Michael was nowhere to be seen. Maybe it will stay that way.

He tries very hard to believe it.

Between John's fourth and fifth Halloween, Charles leaves, and Laurie is faced with the possibility of taking him trick-or-treating. For a while she considers asking Charles' mother, but Paula has grown distant, more in embarrassment for her son's abandonment of his family than over any resentment of "Keri." Laurie, who shares this opinion of Charles, is not inclined to make the extra effort, wary of the possibility that without Charles there to explain her behavior, Paula's puzzlement over her eccentricities might become outright alarm, and thus interference.

She knows this should not be so hard. She is no longer a frightened seventeen, no longer unaware of the danger, and anyway, the danger doesn't exist anymore.

She ends up asking Mrs. Carmody to take John along with her daughter, claiming an exam the next morning that she desperately needs to study for. Mrs. Carmody, with a B.A. in history she has never used, will do almost anything to help that nice young Ms. Tate with her education.

"Mommy doesn't like Halloween," she hears John tell little Tessa. There's no reproach in his voice, only a little sadness that she doesn't share his joy.

He hires the detective when the boy is eight. He cannot afford full-time surveillance; a day or two a month is all his pension will cover. He tells the man that it's his grandchild.

He gives no special instructions, just asks for a detailed report of the boy's day. He doesn't want to prejudice the data, provoke something that's not there. And so, every month, he gets a one-page summary of simple observation, along with a few pictures.

By all accounts, the boy is happy enough, well-adjusted, with a maturity that might be expected from a child whose father is absent and whose mother is clearly holding on by the barest of threads. Loomis reads reports of soccer games and school plays, Saturdays spent riding a bike and Sundays spent playing in a nearby creek.

"If I could only see his eyes," he mutters. There is no one to answer. He makes sure to read the reports on Mrs. Whittington's day off.

The eyes would tell him, not seen through a camera lens, but up close, in color. The eyes had always betrayed Michael's evil.

But he will never get close enough. The pictures will have to do.

She begins watching him more closely at nine, looking for…she's not sure what. Some kind of sign of the madness she carries in her DNA. It would help if she knew what to look for, but none of her reading, none of her research, not newspaper articles or the hospital charts she'd managed to read or the transcripts the Strodes had found for her after finally telling her the truth, has given her any clue. Is it good that he expresses his rage when a boy at school knocks him down? Michael never showed any, not even, apparently, on that first night.

At nine, John wants to go as a murder victim like his two best friends, who have torn clothes and rigged knives to stick out from their chests, where they plan to pour chocolate syrup (they've done their research and know that it looks better than ketchup). Laurie is sure that she can cope, reminds herself that he's nine and obsession with the grotesque is normal. She does just fine until the afternoon of October 31st, when the sight of John with a knife handle protruding from his belly sends her to her medicine cabinet.

"Dad would have let me!" he shouts when she flat-out forbids him to wear the costume. It barely registers through the haze of the pills, but his remorse is enough to make him change into his suit and tie and carry an old briefcase. Danny Tucker's father assures him that lawyers are scarier than any amount of blood.

It comes as no surprise to him that he is dying on Halloween. He's owed this death for fifteen years, and it is only appropriate that he should die on the same night that he cheated death at the clinic.

Mrs. Whittington lives with him full-time now, and he has stopped hiding his clippings and reports and other evidence of his obsession. He wishes he could ask her to continue watching, to keep a weather eye out for trouble, but the most he can persuade her to do is to destroy the evidence of Laurie Strode and her son after he is gone. She does not believe that Michael is still alive, will not believe it, but he hopes that she will at least honor his wish.

The sounds of the hospital, still so familiar after all this time, lull him down into sleep, and he whispers one last fervent prayer.

"Please God, let me be wrong."

She tells him at fourteen. It takes her four days to work up the courage even to drag out the old clippings, and another five to tell him, but she knows that it must be this year. This is the year that parties will take the place of carefully supervised trick-or-treating, and the year that the sneaking out and sneaking away will begin. Next year, he'll be safely ensconced in her school, but next year is next year, and now there are still friends who live in town and places she cannot watch.

"Wow," he says, wide eyes staring at the clippings spread out over the kitchen table.

"If you have any questions," she begins, praying he won't so she won't have to talk about it, praying he will so she will have to talk about it, so she will be sure he _understands_.

"Does Dad know," is the first thing he asks, and she doesn't expect it to cut as deeply as it does.

"Not this," she answers. "I told him something bad happened on Halloween." She doesn't like to wonder if her marriage would have lasted if she'd been more honest, if she'd been able to make Charles understand, really understand the pills and the dreams. John, whose cynicism about his father is as necessary as it is sad, will never even consider it.

"But he's dead, right?"

Laurie bites her lip and doesn't answer, because she wants to say that yes, he _is_ dead, but she also wants to say that he was dead in the Doyles' bedroom and dead when Dr. Loomis shot him and dead when the clinic blew up, and that "dead" is never dead enough.

She watches him read through the clippings. He'll have nightmares, and she'll feel guilty, but he'll stay home on Halloween.

The weather looks like it's going to be fine for tonight's trick-or-treaters, and Marion makes a note to grab an extra bag of candy when she stops for groceries. The children have finally begun coming around, now that the doctor is only a dim memory in most of their minds, and little more than a scary story to the youngest of them. Their parents are still wary, still remember the vague rumors of madness, but five years of Marion's practical, reassuring presence as the house's sole occupant have won them over.

Eventually they even stopped whispering about her connection to the doctor, her own silence giving the rumors little to feed on. Aside from her idiot ex-husband (and hadn't _that_ been a mistake) trying to get a piece of the house that had been left to her mid-divorce, the last five years have been very peaceful.

She misses him, of course, and Halloween always reminds her how much. His study is still a clutter of files and clippings, things she's meant to throw out for years, as she promised, but somehow can't bear to take down. Still, she did promise.

Tonight, after work, before the trick-or-treaters come, she'll finally get to it.

She feels the permission slip staring at her through the desk drawer, and not for the first time, she wishes she'd gone into science or math or anything other than literature, because anthropomorphizing a piece of paper is really not helping the situation.

She knows, of course, that John is growing up. She's neither blind nor particularly stupid. She's also known for a while that he is losing patience with her. He's seventeen, and at seventeen, everything seems surmountable, everything seems as if it should be gotten over, gotten past. The clippings of his homicidal uncle have faded into a family curiosity, one he'd probably be sharing with his friends if he dared push her that far.

She remembers what it felt like to be seventeen. Underneath the second glass of wine, the false name, the nightmares, she does remember.

Laurie takes out the permission slip and scrawls her name before she can think too much more.

It's been twenty years. It's time to move on. Michael Meyers is dead.


End file.
